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Proving social media success is all about analytics

But it’s actually not so elusive, especially for those marketers who’ve embraced the latest social technologies. In fact, there is a treasure trove of data available.

Perhaps, however, marketers should not be thinking old-school marketing metrics for today’s social web. For social, it’s more about the ROE (return on engagement) than the ROI.

Measurement is the number one priority

There’s no denying the importance of social for marketers, as Facebook closes in on 1bn consumers and Twitter tops 200m, not to mention emerging platforms like Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

And as smartphone proliferation continues to rise, literally hundreds of millions of mobile consumers will make social networks their on-the-go portal. Mobile social will be the future and provide us an even more personal and detailed look at a consumer, virtually 24/7. That’s a lot of data.

By now, every major brand has a social presence. But proving exactly what that social presence is doing for your brand, and how it helps you reach our goals, should be priority number one for marketers.

Return on engagment (ROE)

Executives are asking for analytics to prove social ROI, but social is a completely different medium that requires a different way of looking. Executives might be looking for the old-school “ROI” but “ROE” can offer much more including brand awareness and loyalty that lay the foundations for invaluable consumer-to-brand relationships.

An engaged consumer can be much more powerful than a few sales, they can be a walking brand ambassador.

We’ve assembled and integrated over 120 social media metrics into our Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform. That number grows daily. The data is available, and the technologies exist to harness and make sense of that data. But each brand is uniquely different and must learn what they want to know and why.

For most of the people in the executive suite, however, there’s not a great desire to swim through an ocean of data looking for the one little pearl that they need. CEOs want to know that social connection “a” led to consumer pounds spent “b”.

That was never a demand for traditional branding media like billboards, but times have changed and companies are used to the idea of digital affording them more and better numbers.

The fact is, the ability to track consumer behavior on social is already quite impressive. Those abilities are evolving and changing every day, and even if the ROI pearl is not yet here for CEOs, social marketers have great cause to embrace and celebrate the analytics that are available to them, because they greatly inform both content and strategy.

The first course of action is to determine which statistics are relevant to your efforts and what you’re trying to accomplish. With too much of a good thing available, parsing out the key performance indicators (KPI) you want to use to drive your decision-making clears up the picture considerably.

A third party management tool that allows for a customisable analytics dashboard streamlines that process. If it’s one that also allows for different reports for different internal stakeholders, then so much the better, but brands must establish what “success” looks like before they can attempt to measure it.

Facebook facts

Here are some of the many Facebook facts that should be available to you, all by customisable date ranges:

Fan total.

Fan growth and loss.

Fan demographics.

External referrers with traffic counts and percentages.

Unique reach count, paid reach, organic reach, viral reach.

Total impressions, paid impressions, organic impressions, viral impressions, and impressions by story type.

Post totals, post types, top posts, best post times and days.

Sources that drive fan acquisition.

Top countries, cities and languages.

Day to day totals for Page stories, people talking about this, engaged users and Page consumption.

Sentiment.

Top engaged users.

With these metrics, social marketers should be able to not only paint a clear picture of who their audience is and how they’re behaving on social, but also have the ability to quickly determine how content or a specific campaign is resonating with them.

Marketing is a two-step proposition:

Step one is to attract and capture the attention of your target.

Step two is to effectively communicate your value proposition to them.

Step two revolves around your marketing operations’ ability to craft effective content for that collected community that in turn leads to desired branding and yes, sales. Analytics can show you if and how you captured attention… and at what level consumers engaged with that content. There’s much that can be gleaned from that data, and in a real-time response.

Marketers have largely led their businesses into social. Increasingly, however, other organisations within the enterprise are utilising social media to build relationships with today’s socially-connected consumer.

Enterprise brands are looking for a more comprehensive approach that connects across departments for a seamless brand experience with their consumers, across all touch points. Social analytics will play a huge role in providing that full picture.

The future of social analytics

We await new and more comprehensive analytics that get brands closer to where they want to be.

This could include:

A more automated way to monitor organic comments and tie them to specific posts, campaigns, or check-ins.

Tying social activity to existing CRM profiles across the enterprise to monitor the consumer throughout and across all touch points.

Attributing a social touch point directly to an individual sale (sCommerce, coupon redemption and location-based deals are already doing some of this).

Integrating social analytics completely with www analytics.

Until then, there are more than enough metrics to tell a strongly convincing ROE story.

As social continues to grow and mature, look for brands to deploy a more comprehensive, seamless approach that ties together enterprise for a consumer’s entire digital footprint. That future is much closer that you might think.

With regards to "Attributing a social touch point directly to an individual sale" --

I don't think it's a simple one-to-one relationship with social media. There might be multiple interactions before a sale, including social and traditional online marketing. How can you definitively say one clinched the deal. I think it's always going to be a combination of factors.

Good points here but I think we need to unpack them a bit to make the case for ROE a bit more clear.

You can certainly measure ROI in the traditional sense, but those need to be transactional data points. In that way, measuring campaign success is fairly easy if you have properly connected all the dots between social activities and sales.

ROE (as described) is much more sticky because it's essentially trying to measure the value of an entire social media program, which is very difficult because a "social media program" ideally works across business units helping each one achieve difference goals. But the value of socially active customers and socially sourced prospects can be measured with sCRM. So while you may not be able to measure the monetary value of each post your community manager makes, you should be able to use sCRM data to measure the value of your socially active customers in terms of their engagement with your properties. They key is asking the right questions. For example: Do socially active customers spend more, are they more loyal, do they refer more? Are there differences between customers who engage more with us on FB vs. Twitter?

Most companies will track and measure every phone call and email that goes out to customers, but are very much in the dark when it comes to all the touchpoints their customers have with their brand on social. If we start to use social data as a source of business intelligence, we can then start to make better business decisions.

This is a great article. One of the things we're trying to understand better at Shop Direct Group is the cause or effect issue of a Facebook fan. Essentially the question boils down to whether a customer spends more as a result of the social content they see, or whether because they are a fan of the brand they are already predisposed to spend more. What we are missing is a date stamp for when someone becomes a fan.

Great article on the benefits on the necessity of effectively using analytics to track how much of an influence an engaged online community can have on providing a return. Turning members of your online community into brand ambassadors seems to be the best way to spread positivity about a brand. Analytics also allows marketers to know how not to waste their efforts on users who will not fully engage with the brand message.

You can get overwhelmed by data points but let's take a step back. Make pretend you're not a marketer.

Why does a consumer do Facebook or Twitter? Because it's fun? And I like content because it's interesting, I'll share it with my friends, or comment if I think I have an opinion on a post.

So the issue with marketers- how to leverage this fun for branding, increased website traffic, and sales. We're still learning what "engagement" is and how it equates to lead generation, quote request, or purchase.

At the end of the day, if a CMO or top management is convinced that share of voice is increasing over time, and marketing ROI decreases, then there is actual value to the efforts. Of course, the connection with SEO is undeniable.

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